Cheney attacks Edwards for missing votes in the Senate; Edwards lists all the stuff Cheney voted against in the House, including “meals on wheels for seniors.” Point to Edwards, I think — which Cheney all but conceded, by stammering out a “the Senator’s record speaks for itself” non-retort.
One thing that’s clear from this debate is that each of the vice-presidential candidates is more articulate, faster-tongued and faster-witted than the guys at the top of the tickets.
Veeps mano a mano
Lost my net connection for a while so no live blogging from Web 2.0 for now — I’ll post more later tonight. In the meantime, I’m in a room with about two dozen refugees from the conference cocktail party (including, that I can see and recognize, Dan Gillmor, Jeff Jarvis, Micah Sifry, Chris Nolan and Mitch Kapor) watching the vice-presidential debate. So far John Edwards seems to be more than holding his own against Dick Cheney’s sneers. “Wait till he says ‘Go fuck yourself,'” somebody said.
Random links
This fast-cut edit of Republican convention rhetoric strips the Bush campaign down to its essence.
John Darnielle, the amazing singer-songwriter mastermind of the Mountain Goats, also runs a Web site of writing on popular music called Last Plane to Jakarta. He recently switched to using blog software on his site, so there’s an RSS feed you can subscribe to. I have.
Flickr, the superb photo-sharing web application I wrote about last month, is now selling “pro” accounts for people who expect to upload a lot of photos. (“Preview pricing” is about $40/year, discounted for now from the planned full price of $60.) I’ve signed up for two years. Great design and good service online are worth paying for.
Tom Friedman — still waiting for Bush to do right
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman returns from a book leave today with a column that roars its outrage at the Bush administration’s disastrous Iraq policy — and then, bizarrely, collapses into a quivering heap of divorced-from-reality bipartisanship.
First Friedman catalogues Bush’s catastrophic choices, in great detail and with the brevity and forthrightness that mark his best work — and minus the catch-phrase coinages that mar his worst. Bush failed to commit enough troops to secure post-invasion Iraq. He relied on the bad word of Rumsfeld’s “Iraqi pals.” He “never established U.S. authority in Iraq.” A “decent outcome in Iraq” is vital, but “this Bush team can’t get us there, and may have so messed things up that no one can. Why? Because each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and ideology.” Bush couldn’t bring himself to fire “an evangelical Christian U.S. general who smears Islam in a speech while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army,” or raise taxes on gas, or fire anyone who was responsible for the torture at Abu Ghraib. “Mr. Bush is president, charged with protecting the national interest, and yet from the beginning he has run Iraq policy as an extension of his political campaign.”
So, obviously, Bush must go, right?
No, I’m afraid Friedman’s conclusion is as follows: “We’re in trouble in Iraq. We have to immediately get the Democratic and Republican politics out of this policy and start honestly reassessing what is the maximum we can still achieve there and what every American is going to have to do to make it happen. If we do not, we’ll end up not only with a fractured Iraq, but with a fractured America, at war with itself and isolated from the world.”
I’m sorry, but this makes no sense. America is already deeply fractured — just look at the polls, or talk to your neighbors; at war with itself — look at how insanely close this election is likely to be; and isolated from the world. The nation’s leaders gave Bush bipartisanship in the days after 9/11, and again in the leadup to the Iraq war, and Bush abused and insulted those foolish enough to think he is actually the “uniter” he once claimed to be.
There are just about 30 days to the presidential election. Politics cannot, will not, should not stop at such a moment. Anyone who believes all the points Friedman makes in his column has no choice but to demand that Bush be booted out of office. Why can’t Friedman bring himself to say that?
Time after time in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, we were subjected to the spectacle of this columnist — who’d made an agonizing-in-public call to support the war, but only if it was pursued in certain carefully defined ways — wringing his hands: “Bush said he was going to turn Iraq into a beacon of democracy. Why isn’t he doing all the things he promised to make that happen? Time is running out!”
At this late date, I fail to understand how Friedman thinks there is even an iota of possibility that Bush might suddenly wake up, alter course and salvage something out of his Iraq mess. Perhaps it is just desperately wishful thinking, an involuntary reaction to the awful pit-of-the-stomach queasiness of contemplating just how far off track Bush has led this still-imperilled nation.
However he arrived at his colossal non-sequitur, Friedman, I think, needs to brush up on that old saying about “Fool me once, shame on you — fool me twice, shame on me.” This line, of course, is probably best known today in its Texas Bushism variant, in which our president got his folklore all tangled up with his Who’s Next song titles. “We won’t get fooled again” are actually pretty good watchwords for anyone whose eyes have been open during the last four years. Tom Friedman, meet Pete Townshend.
BONUS LINK: Doc Searls posts on the same topic, framing the election as a “recall” of Bush.
About those lectern lights
As Salon’s War Room discussed earlier today, the Bush campaign insisted on those ridiculous recumbent traffic lights on each candidate’s lectern, hoping that the emphasis on the time limits would hurt the proverbially long-winded John Kerry.
So it only serves them right that, while Kerry stuck to the rules and confined his responses to the allotted time, those dumb lights only ended up emphasizing the multiple occasions on which George Bush ran out of things to say before his lights had flashed.
What was supposed to highlight one candidate’s verbosity ended up emphasizing the other’s vacuity.
Sigh me a river
In the first Gore/Bush debate in 2000, as we know, viewers who actually watched the debate thought Gore won — but by the time the spinners were finished, and the media coverage was done obsessing over Gore’s sighing reactions to his opponent, the consensus was that Bush had prevailed.
I dunno, I just finished watching George Bush sigh at least a half dozen times — as well as grimace, pout and otherwise express his exasperation at John Kerry’s inexplicable failure to pontificate or gasbag beyond the 2-minute limit Bush’s handlers had insisted upon.
Will Bush get called on it? Or is sighing only culpable when it’s done by Democrats?
Speaking unblinking truth to power
“Someone who blinks when things get hard is not the right person to win the war on terror.” That’s President Bush’s communications director, Nicolle Devenish, in this morning’s New York Times.
Now, maybe Bush doesn’t blink. But we know that the current president, “when things got hard” on 9/11, sat with a dull, vacant stare for agonizingly long minutes in a Florida classroom before waking up to the fact that he was commander-in-chief and the nation was under attack. And we know that Kerry fought in Vietnam, led troops in combat and saved comrades’ lives. Who would you rather have guarding your back?
But look how effectively the Bush team has cemented its message: Kerry is a wimp. That’s what this whole campaign has been about: Karl Rove’s sick but smart strategy punched Kerry in the groin with the Swift Boat Veterans’ lies, then used Kerry’s failure to punch back hard to demonstrate that the candidate has no guts. If he can’t protect his reputation, goes the subtext, how will he protect your children? (Josh Marshall applied the crude but accurate label of “bitch-slap” to this psychodynamic.) Depressingly, this neanderthal logic actually appears to be working: NPR reported this morning that “soccer moms” are turning into “security moms,” as Bush makes some inroads among female voters normally thought to lean Democratic.
Kerry really has only one big opportunity left to change the tide of this campaign: At Thursday’s debate, he needs to get in President Bush’s face. Since Bush has chosen to make this a showdown over the candidates’ masculinity, Kerry should take off the gloves. The Bush campaign has outrageously reframed all criticism of its failed policies as “aiding and abetting the enemy”; it has scandalously declared that if the nation elects Kerry, we’ll get the terrorist attack we deserve. This president has forfeited the decorum that normally prevails between candidates. Kerry should feel no obligation to civility.
For the sake of the country and the world, I hope Kerry and his advisers are preparing debate lines something like this:
“Mr. Bush, after 9/11 your job as president was to protect this nation, and you’ve failed. You didn’t bring the World Trade Center attackers to justice. Bin Laden is still on the loose, and the Taliban still operate in Afghanistan. Instead, you led the nation into a war on Iraq on false grounds. You botched the war, and thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died and are still dying because of your mistakes. In a time when America should have been a beacon of justice to Iraq and to the world, you allowed our troops to torture enemy prisoners. Despite all these mistakes, not a single official in your administration has ever taken real responsibility for them.
I know what responsibility means, Mr. President. Do you? I didn’t ask my daddy to find me a safe berth away from the fighting in Vietnam. I know what it’s like to have people’s lives depend on my split-second calls. I’ve made the choices that won battles and saved troops’ lives. Have you?
You’re a failure, Mr. President, and the only way this country can get back on track is by putting you on the unemployment line.”
I’m no speechwriter, but it seems to me that Kerry has nothing to lose and everything to gain by being blunt — by showing he’s not afraid to face Bush down. Bush is at his best following a script, and he’s at his worst when he’s confronted by the unexpected (like in that Florida classroom). Kerry ought to rattle him with the facts.
They can keep the angry demonstrators far away from Bush’s speeches. They can jack up the polls with deceptive ads. But, so far at least, they can’t stop the opposition candidate, if he has the requisite nerve, from speaking the truth on live television.
Joe Trippi and Mitch Kapor
If you were paying attention to the political world last winter you probably already know who Joe Trippi is. And if you’ve been paying attention to the computer world for the last 20 years or so you probably already know who Mitch Kapor is. Both of these guys have spent a significant amount of time thinking about how technology can reshape the arena of democracy, and just possibly improve things.
Kapor will be talking with Trippi about his new book, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” in a live Webcast tomorrow, Friday, at 2 p.m. Pacific Time. More info here. It’s the start of a regular series at the Of, By and For site.
Read any good terrorist books lately?
Among many other unfortunate provisions in the Patriot Act, passed in haste and hysteria in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there’s one that’s especially loathsome to American values: It gives the government an unprecedented and scary carte blanche to paw through library and bookstore records to see what you’ve been reading. If you believe that such records might actually help the government nail the next wave of al-Qaida terrorists, then you don’t have to do anything. But if you believe, as I do, that this particular power is useless for that goal — but might prove handy for John Ashcroft and successors should they decide that, for example, citizens who read too many books about subject X might warrant close surveillance — then you should go here and sign the petition by the Campaign for Reader Privacy, a coalition of booksellers, librarians and writers, to push Congress to change this un-American law.
This particular part of the Patriot Act is one of those stealth provisions that simply invites government abuse. Consider: “The FBI may request the records secretly; it is not required to prove that there is ‘probable cause’ to believe the person whose records are being sought has committed a crime; and the bookseller or librarian who receives an order is prohibited from revealing it to anyone except those whose help is needed to produce the records.”
This isn’t the sort of power we should trust in any government’s hands; given the current administration’s record, it’s even scarier.